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Marcello Di Cintio’s account of the culture of enclosure takes Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political non-fiction

Account of the culture of enclosure takes Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political non-fiction

Marcello Di Cintio won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize Wednesday for his book Walls: Travels Along the Barricades

Walls: Travels Along the Barricades

By GREG QUILLBOOKS COLUMNIST

Thu., March 7, 2013

Calgary writer Marcello Di Cintio was named winner Wednesday of the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, a moving and vivid account of the cultural effects of enclosure, observed during his travels along the world’s troubled borders in India, Arizona, Palestine, Mexico, Cyprus and Belfast.

The prize was handed out in Ottawa at the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s prestigious Politics and the Pen Gala. The selection was made by a jury comprising former NPD leader and political scientist Ed Broadbent, newspaper columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, and novelist/translator Daniel Poliquin.

In their citation Walls was described as “beautifully written reportage (in which) the author brings readers the personal stories — gripping, haunting, humorous, and inspiring — of people living against walls around the world. Marcello Di Cintio discovers walls divide far more than nations.”

Walls won over Cohen Prize contenders Taras Grescoe for Straphanger: Saving Our Citiesand Ourselves from the Automobile; Noah Richler for What We Talk About When We Talk About War; Jeffrey Simpson for Chronic Condition: Why Canada’s Health-Care System Needs to be Dragged into the 21st Century; and Peter F. Trent for The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal.

On being shortlisted for the Cohen Prize, Di Cintio wrote on his web site, “The nomination both thrilled and surprised me.

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“Although the book is set along fortified political lines, I never regarded Walls a political book. I considered it a travelogue. And I never thought of myself as a political writer, certainly not in the same vein as my illustrious co-nominees. I am happy, though, that the jury disagreed.”

Di Cintio’s first book, Harmattan: Wind Across West Africa, won the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book, and the follow-up, Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey Into the Heart of Iran, won the Wilfred Eggleston Prize.

His work has been published in the Walrus, EnRoute, Geist, and the Globe and Mail.

Walls was longlisted for both the BC National Award for Canadian Non-fiction and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction.

The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize was established in honour of the outspoken and popular Windsor, Ont. MP who died on December 9, 1998. The prize, now in its 13th year, is awarded annually to a non-fiction book that targets a political subject of interest to Canadian readers and has the potential to influence Canadian political life.

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